Second books in romantasy trilogies usually have one job: hold the reader’s attention while the author moves furniture around for the finale. Elise Kova refuses that assignment. She opens with her heroine chained, beaten, and dragged back to the prison she barely escaped, and she does not let up for another five hundred pages. The result is a sequel, Prince of Swords, that is angrier, stranger, and considerably more violent than the book that preceded it. It is also messier. Both of those things are worth talking about.
Reading the Spread: Where This Book Sits in the Series
Kova has laid out the Arcana Academy series as a trilogy, and only two cards are on the table so far:
- Arcana Academy (2025), which introduced Clara Graysword, the tarot magic of Oricalis, and her forced engagement to Prince Kaelis.
- Prince of Swords (2026), the middle volume reviewed here.
- Arcana Academy Book Three, currently untitled, listed in the front matter of this edition as the conclusion.
The publisher is Del Rey, the hardcover runs roughly 560 pages across eighty short chapters, and the audiobook is narrated by Anna Burnett. This is not a standalone. Readers who skip book one will spend fifty pages guessing who half these people are and why anyone cares about a card called the Wheel of Fortune.
What You Need to Know Going In
Prince of Swords by Elise Kova begins seconds after the previous book’s closing scene, with Clara captured and Oricalis’s most wanted. What follows is a prison break, an alliance with a half-destroyed secret order called the Worldkeepers, and a long, tense return to the academy where nearly everyone who might recognize her would happily collect the bounty on her head. Kaelis remains the axis she spins around: headmaster, second-born prince, and a man whose reputation for atrocity turns out to be earned rather than exaggerated.
Beyond that, the plot deserves to unfold on its own terms. The publisher’s copy about Clara walking a dagger’s edge is accurate, and the final forty pages recontextualise almost everything that came before.
The Cards That Land
Kova’s magic system remains the strongest thing she has built in years, and this book puts real pressure on it. Cards are physical objects. They are inked by hand, they cost powder and time to make, they are consumed when cast, and running out mid-fight is a genuine problem. Battles here are logistical as much as they are athletic, and watching Clara ration a thinning deck while calculating which enemy dies first is more satisfying than any amount of unexplained power surge. The book’s willingness to make magic finite is what keeps its action scenes honest.
Where the sequel improves most sharply on book one:
- Kaelis gets an interior life. He is no longer the smirking obstacle. His confessions arrive late and cost him something, and the scenes where his composure fails are the best character work Kova has produced.
- The supporting cast earns page time. Twino and Ren’s quiet domestic retirement, Sorza’s dry opportunism, and Thal’s professional refusal to be used are all more textured than the average romantasy side bench.
- The stakes are physical. People die badly. Injuries linger. The book does not heal its way out of consequence, and it does not pretend torture is a plot device you can walk off.
- Consent and aftermath get attention. A subplot about a card that erases pain becomes a careful argument about why numbing a wound is not the same as closing it. It is the most thoughtful thread in Prince of Swords by Elise Kova.
Where the Reading Goes Cold
The book’s central problem is structural. Its engine is a chain of acquisitions: Clara needs a design, then an ingredient, then a card, then a ritual, then a location. Each link is competently written, and several are exciting on their own, but the accumulation starts to feel like a checklist somewhere around the midpoint. Roughly two hundred pages pass in which the emotional situation barely moves.
The romance suffers from a related loop. Clara doubts Kaelis, confronts Kaelis, receives a partial truth, forgives him, and then doubts him again. That cycle repeats at least four times. Kova writes each confrontation well, and the final one at the ruins of Clan Hermit is genuinely excellent, but the pattern becomes visible long before the payoff arrives, which drains tension from arguments that should be devastating.
Other places where the deck runs thin:
- Ravin never develops past cruelty. He is frightening in the way a hornet is frightening, and his single late attempt at complexity arrives too abruptly to reshape him.
- Grief gets rushed. Two significant losses are absorbed and set aside inside a chapter each so the plot can resume. The mourning that does happen, much later, feels imported rather than earned.
- The magic needs a glossary, and it has one. A four-page card index at the back is useful, but needing it mid-battle suggests the exposition is not carrying its weight.
- Eighty chapters is a lot. Many run four pages. The choppiness suits the pace early and works against immersion later.
- The spice is frequent but uneven. One extended sequence built on magical dream-sharing is inventive; several others read as pauses in an otherwise urgent plot.
Around four stars feels right. Prince of Swords is ambitious and often thrilling, and it is also baggy in the middle in a way a firmer edit would have solved.
Kova’s Voice on the Page
The prose is first person, present tense, clipped, and heavy on short declaratives when Clara is frightened. Kova writes violence with unsentimental specificity and writes tenderness in longer, looser sentences, and the contrast does real work. She has been refining this register since the Air Awakens books, and it is now unmistakably hers.
A Word Before You Open It
Kova prefaces the novel with her own content note, and it is not decorative. The book handles imprisonment, torture, bodily transformation, substance use, suicidal ideation, domestic violence, and the death of family members. Sensitive readers should treat that note as accurate rather than cautious.
Elsewhere in Kova’s Work
Readers new to her should know she is prolific. The Air Awakens series is her long-running epic fantasy foundation, the Married to Magic standalones (A Deal with the Elf King, A Dance with the Fae Prince, A Duel with the Vampire Lord, A Duet with the Siren Duke, A Dawn with the Wolf Knight) are her lightest entry point, and The Loom Saga, A Trial of Sorcerers, and Dragon Cursed round out the shelf.
If This Deck Suits You, Try These Next
- Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, for occult academia with real teeth.
- The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake, for morally compromised scholars and shifting alliances.
- A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle L. Jensen, for fated-bond romance with political weight.
- Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros, for high-mortality magic school pacing.
- Coven of Bones by Harper L. Woods, for darker academy romantasy.
- Arcana Academy, the first book, which you genuinely do need first.
Final Reading
Prince of Swords by Elise Kova is a middle book that behaves like a climax, which is both its great strength and the source of its exhaustion. It asks a harder question than most series of its kind bother with: if you could remake the world, would you actually understand what you were asking for? The answer it delivers in the last chapter is bleak, brave, and entirely earned. Get past the sagging middle and the payoff is one of the better cliffhangers in recent fantasy romance. It also makes the wait for book three genuinely uncomfortable, which is presumably the point.